Shadow Man: A Novel

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  He tells me every day about Kurt and Vera. They’re the only alive things in that brain of his. I listen and imagine as he repeats their story under his breath. I am good at that. As a child I played make-believe, running through hidden passageways and lurking beneath windows, spying on neighbors with pocket cameras and decoder rings. Life is best understood in whispers, not in laughter and loud voices; we carry with us the secret things that quietly wear us away. I watched birds, too. My binoculars scanned the skies over fields of wildflowers and thistle. Dusk was the best time to see them, flying against the invading darkness; swift birds with tiny hearts and wings of purple, yellow, and black, and higher, hawks circling on wind currents like kings and queens in a storybook. I collected fallen feathers and taped them to my closet door, which over the years grew into a plume as lush as a Cherokee headdress. Birds were magic to me. They could go anywhere. I was a gangly girl, untamed knees and elbows peeking from my communion dress, lost in the silk and taffeta of my prom gown. I evened out eventually and, although I am not a beauty, men have suggested I possess a bookish sexiness. I can never tell if that is a promise or a lie. There is so little space between the two, and as any woman knows men are capable of the sweetest phrases between happy hour and last call. I suppose it means I am thin and wear glasses and tied-back hair but have good breasts and clear skin. Even in adolescence, when other girls cotton-balled themselves with astringents and emollients, my skin was as bright as an empty page. James doesn’t mention such things. He offers no compliments, tells no half-truths; he looks at me the way a stranger does in a grocery store, a flicker of recognition that vanishes as the carts pass. I hope for more. The doctors, the administration, no one knows the secret bond I have to James. The way I appeared — an applicant with strong recommendations seeking work in an institution with high turnover — is a matter of perseverance with which I have been blessed. A natural talent, I suppose, in the way a handyman is gifted to fix broken blenders and sewing machines. We each have our proclivities, those things big and small that make us unique and enviable in the eyes of others. I suspect I am not much envied, although I do have, despite my previously mentioned active imagination, a reputation for pragmatism, but that may be the twin of perseverance. I prefer to think of myself as a quiet multitude of unappreciated qualities.

  If that sounds bitter, I am not. I am a woman searching amid hallways, carrying syringes and paper cups of pills. I like the weight of the stethoscope around my neck, and sometimes I listen to my heart, marveling at the mystery of its energy and wondering how and when it will stop. Tick-tock. I don’t linger on such thoughts. I have a mission. I carry James’s chart. It is battered and heavy, and although I write neatly in it, meticulous in my numbers and abbreviations, it is filled with pages of what we nurses call “doctor-scratch.” I cannot read it all but I know what it says about advancing Alzheimer’s, the shutdown of the light field across the medial temporal lobes (MTL), where the larva-shaped hippocampus loses its grasp of memory, perhaps caused long ago by trauma or maybe a disfigured gene or other predisposition that lurked in the tissue since birth only to one day bloom with mischievous intent. There are so many ways for a mind to tumble and lose itself in worlds far from us. The body on those Discovery Channel documentaries is glorious, intricate, and strong, a wonder of God conspiring with nature, but really we are as fragile as rice paper, ruined over time by imperceptible rips and tears.

  I search for clues on a color-coded poster of the brain in profile I kept from nursing school. It strikes me that the most ingenious thing about us humans — not counting the soul — looks like a boxing glove. Atop which, to borrow a metaphor from James’s curly haired doctor, the cerebral cortex hovers like a trapped cloud. Where are the answers? I study the science and anatomy of James, his blood pressure, reflexes, temperature, the dose of his cholinesterase inhibitors, but I don’t know him, not even on my late shift, when all the doctors are home and I hold his CAT scans to the light and he floats before me, fleshless, a silver-gray apparition, yielding little. His hip bones resemble folded wings, his forearms flutes, his legs strange spindly reeds. He has five fillings, a broken rib that must have been untended when he was a boy, healing poorly, leaving the thread of disjointed marrow. This is what the pictures of science and technology bare. This is what I see. It is not enough. I need him to come back.

  four

  The marshlands south of Philly stretch to Wilmington and to beaches beyond; they glisten brown and green in the wind and make you think of another time. We skated by them in Kurt’s Impala, the windows down, our hair flying and me wedged between Vera and Kurt in the front seat. The radio played so loud that it was a cacophony (I had my dictionary on the trip) of static and breeze, although every now and then a recognizable tune burst through, like the guitar lick in “Signs” by the Five Man Electrical Band or the chords of the great wa-wa opening of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

  We came around a bend and drove over a small bridge, the Impala bouncing along as if racing across a surface made of stretched rubber bands. I thought I heard “Tiny Dancer,” and when I looked over I swore Vera was mouthing the words, but I couldn’t be sure because her hair was a black sea tossing around her. Kurt stopped for coffee at a shack with a sandy parking lot. Vera got out and pointed her face toward the sun, leaning on the car and asking Kurt to buy her lemons. Kurt walked through a screen door and flies scattered and I saw an old black man with a tilted hat peek up from behind the counter as if he had been awakened; he smiled the colors of stained ivory and broken gold.

  “I love a car trip, don’t you, Jim?”

  “Sometimes they get too long.”

  “Can you read a map?”

  “Not too well.”

  “Unfolding them is like opening a mystery. New worlds stretching before you in circuitous lines. There’s a word for you, Jim. Circuitous. You can run your fingers along roads and mountains and coasts. I wish I’d have lived centuries ago. I would have been an explorer. But you know something? I’m tired after a car trip. I think that’s funny, don’t you? You’re just sitting for hours, listening to music and wind, but it takes it out of you, you know? Maybe, it’s the sun, and the distance, and your body having to re-gather in a new place.”

  I looked out the window to Vera. She had on shorts and a white halter top with a collar and black buttons on the front. She pulled back her hair and tied it with ribbon. I still couldn’t tell how old she was. She was hard to read that way; she could be young, like that night a week or so ago when she was hitting tennis balls in the alley, or she could be older, like now with the sun and no shadows on her face. I heard the flat rubber sounds of cars passing in the distance and the bark of a boat horn coming from the ocean beyond the marshes. Kurt came out and handed me a Sprite and gave Vera a knife and a bag of lemons. Kurt sat on the hood, sipping his coffee, and Vera cut lemons, squeezing the juice in her mouth and not even wincing like most people do.

  “Juiciest lemon I ever had was in Sorrento.”

  Kurt and I looked at each other.

  “That’s in Italy, boys, below Naples. The cliffs are high and the lemons are big as a grapefruit. You could fill a whole glass with one lemon. I swam in the blue sea and dreamed of sirens tempting sailors. Imagine voices so pretty that they lead you to ruin. Haunting. There’s another word for you, Jim. Haunting. A voice out there in the mist, calling.”

  Kurt and I had seen Jason and the Argonauts on TV, but neither of us said anything and Vera went on slicing and squeezing lemons, the juice dripping down her forearms and elbows and into the sand. She could do that. Begin a story, frame it out pretty so as to invite you in, and then let it trail off the way a breeze lifts out of nowhere and vanishes.

  Kurt tossed his coffee cup and we were off again. Marvin Gaye was on the radio, but we lost him when Kurt accelerated and the car filled with crackle and wind and Vera’s flying hair. The road beyond the windshield was wide and not too curvy. Kurt was sweating and daydreaming, his hand loose on th
e wheel. What was going on? It wasn’t like Kurt to take a vacation so suddenly. He hadn’t been off work since Mom died, but the summer days and Vera enticed him. We still didn’t know her real story, or at least I didn’t. Kurt may have because he and Vera had been staying up long nights talking. They weren’t sleeping together. When I’d come down in the mornings, Kurt was back-flat on the floor and Vera was curled on the couch. They’d ease into the day like two cats; Kurt making coffee and pouring juice; Vera snatching the Inky from the porch, thumbing through pages and glancing at ads and pictures with the occasional, “Hey, Kurt look at this.” Her clothes tangled with his, hanging off the banister and on the towel racks in the bathroom scented with her balms of lilac and musk. She’d sit on the back stoop and murmur Buddhist chants and sometimes it seemed she went into a trance. Neighbors peeked from behind window shades and Kurt told the Kowalskys and McMurphys that Vera was a “distant relative who had spent her life in exotic places.” Vera played along, calling Kurt “Cuz” and inventing family histories.

  She’d come into my room and lie beside me while I studied the dictionary, asking me to read her the second and third meanings of words. I’d read slow and I could feel my voice calm her or maybe it was the glow of the lamp and the sounds of distant cars in the alleys. She’d close her eyes and tell me that words were masks and disguises. “Did you know, Jim, that God has ninety-nine names in Arabic? The Avenger. The Truth. The Shaper of Beauty. They’re written in holy books and on fortress walls deep in the desert. Go see these places one day, Jim. Promise me you’ll go and trace God’s name on a desert wall.” A few times at night, while Kurt was sleeping, I’d sneak and sit on the stairs and see Vera in her underpants and T-shirt kneeling beside the radiator, twirling her hair and staring at the front door as if waiting for someone to turn the knob. Once, I thought I heard her crying and talking to herself in the basement, and when she came up, wiping a startled look off her face, she told me she had been singing a rhyme from childhood and was sad that childhood would never come again. She put a picture of a yogi, a guy with a long beard who looked like he had diapers on and hadn’t eaten in a while, on the coffee table. She bought beads and hung them between the kitchen and the dining room and then tried to teach Kurt to meditate by closing his eyes and sitting pretzel-legged, but Kurt cracked up and shook his head when she lit incense around him.

  “Vera, this isn’t me.”

  “You need to get in touch with your inner self.”

  “My inner self is doing just fine without me going to look for it.”

  Sprawling as she was in moods and scented possessions, though, Vera could not make the house her own, not even by carving her initials above the stove near the crucifix. Mom’s spirit was there, not ready to give its blessing for Kurt to start a new life. That was fair. No one wants to be forgotten, especially in a house that held your pots and recipes and two boxes of stuff Kurt and I taped and wrote on with Magic Marker and slid into the attic next to the Christmas ornaments and a bicycle that had been there since before we moved in. It’s hard to choose what you want to save of a person; it makes you wonder if you really knew them at all. Every scrap, shred, picture, scribbled note, favorite sweater is sacred.

  Vera slipped in amid these things when we weren’t looking. She brought stories that made the world bigger and more interesting. Our row house didn’t have enough rooms to hold Vera’s tales and Mom’s memory, so Kurt, finding a streak of spontaneity I had only seen on the tennis court, stepped into my room just before dawn and announced: “Jim, we’re hitting the road. Get dressed.” He loaded us into the Impala when the streets were dewy and cool, and paperboys strained against their canvas sacks of headlines, while milkmen delivered bottles from Kensington to Fish Town to Rittenhouse Square. Paperboys and milkmen didn’t need maps. They knew the alleys, back alleys, crevices, the fires in the drums near the trestles, the shantytowns on the riverbank and the iron and cement underbelly that kept the city from sinking. A lot of paperboys I knew were also altar boys; milkmen were pretty much just milkmen, except for Eddie Blankenridge who strangled widows in their bathrobes before the police arrested him climbing out of a window.

  I had packed shorts, T-shirts, one pair of jeans, my dictionary, and the Beatles’ White Album. You never know when you might come across a stereo. The White Album was my favorite, a jumble of moods and images. That’s what I liked most about the Beatles; they were magpies (one of my favorite words, looked up after I heard it in a poem) gathering a little of this and a little of that and turning them into “Rocky Raccoon,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and “Savory Truffle.” Vera liked the Beatles, too, but was more partial to the Rolling Stones and Tim Buckley. Kurt liked some guy named Walter Jackson, who had a deep, welling voice with no cracks, like a perfect sphere. That’s all we had to listen to in the Impala — the radio and one Walter Jackson eight-track that kept sticking on song three until Kurt whacked it and it warbled back to the baritone of a man broken by the cruelty of love.

  “Kurt, you have to buy more music.”

  “I could listen to Walter Jackson every hour of every day.”

  “I don’t know if Jim and I can.”

  Kurt hit the gas and the car gripped the road, speeding south along the Delaware coast. Vera tried to light a cigarette but matches died against the wind. She cupped her hands and dipped her head below the glove box, and finally asked Kurt to slow down, which made Walter Jackson louder, like God coming through a silver speaker. Vera took a drag and Kurt was off again, Vera’s ember burning orange and fast. I kept looking over at her. Who was this woman? She said in the diner that night we met her that she was hiding from a man, and then with her stories of Cairo and Marrakesh I thought of her as a spy or a damsel of intrigue, an updated Lizabeth Scott with purple-tinted sunglasses and fingernails dotted with stars. Kurt wasn’t telling me all he knew, and he seemed a different person, too, a man with more sides than I had once known. If I held him to the light I’d see all kinds of angles and colors. He started wearing sandals and skipped his normal haircut day at Johnny’s; he didn’t even shave every day, and on the days he didn’t he looked like, but not exactly like, an apostle.

  We crossed out of Delaware to Maryland and into eastern Virginia and the scents of bay crabs and marshes and smoked ham; signs for fireworks and summer squash. Moss hung in streaks and tresses, and the air was heavy. Dragonflies at the road’s edge hovered over Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susies and buzzed away, slowly, as if flying through a sky of invisible honey. The earth was wild here, shaggy and vine-filled, devouring almost, yet serene, and the air clung to you like scrims of wet breath blowing across your shoulders and neck. Steeples slumped like tilted hats on wooden churches and rusted corrugated sheds, covered in strangling vines, sheltered lawn mowers and half-put-together motorcycles. Two men were gliding scythes through weeds and I swore I could hear their blades, the faintest rip and a whoosh of air, as if you ran your fingers through a cave of spider webs. They kept slicing like they were slow-dancing with crescents in the cool cut grass of a shade tree, their perimeter widening into the sun, but in no particular hurry. I could smell the grass. As we came around a bend, a black boy riding the whitest horse I had ever seen galloped through the thin pines, kicking up sand and needles and disappearing over a small bridge into the thicker woods. The boy had no saddle and he gripped the mane, flying almost, it seemed to me, his weight insubstantial and no burden on the muscle and bone moving beneath him. Vera spotted the boy. She turned her head as the car passed, watching the white horse shift from sunlight and shadow as it sprinted deeper into the woods toward another break of field, and maybe she was thinking of the Maghreb or some other distant place.

  “I need to play tennis,” Kurt announced.

  He pulled the Impala over at a brick school off Route 13. There were two courts of cracked asphalt and ripped nets. Kurt looked at them and wondered if we should just move on, but he opened the trunk, pulled off his jeans, put on his tennis shorts, grabbed his Sla
zenger racquet and two cans of tennis balls. Vera put sun lotion on her face and lounged on the hood. Kurt started serving to an empty court and as he got to the fifth ball — before I could join him — a guy with spider crab legs and falling-down tube socks walked to the baseline with a racquet. He had an Afro and wore a tank top and sneakers ripped near the toes.

  “You wanna hit?” he said in a drawl that seemed to mimic the way he sauntered along the fence.

  “Why not?”

  Kurt looked at me and winked. He started off easy, loping the ball deep toward the guy, settling into a rhythm. The guy struggled at first, misjudging balls, reacting too late, swinging wildly. But after a few minutes he settled and tugged his body tight, finding an economy of motion. Every move was a burst of concise energy, nothing wasted; it flowed through the shoulder to the elbow down the forearm through the wrist — a motion of flipping pancakes, only faster, tighter — to the sweet spot in the racquet, where the ball struck a clear chord, like a bass tuned to perfection or the voice of Walter Jackson. The guy was moving Kurt, pulling him with angles and variations of spin and speed, and Kurt was mixing it up with drop shots, slices, and down-the-line backhands, trying to crack the guy, but the guy was like a fish, darting when necessary and then rippling soft in a current. He was pretty to watch. Beads of sweat spattered around him on the baseline and evaporated in the sun. Kurt kept trying to find the guy’s weak spot, but on some days, with some guys, there is no weak spot and Kurt lost two close sets. Kurt shook the guy’s hand at the net and the two walked off the court; Kurt not minding, not too much anyway, being beat by a better player, a raggedly dressed guy out of the piney woods, and then saying how tennis was good that way, bringing strangers together, forcing them to share intimacies, showing themselves and their characters on the shots they chose.